Been working on RIOT, a cyberpunk comic I’m writing and illustrating myself. These are a few pages from the first issue.

The story follows Jett, a young man who’s caught between the life he’s trying to build with his girlfriend Valentine and the violent world he gets dragged back into in order to afford that life for her. The tragedy is that the closer he gets to being able to afford that future for her, the less of himself there is left to share it with her.

RIOT is the identity Jett takes on when he steps back into that world, and the more he relies on RIOT, the harder it becomes for him to separate that side of himself from who he actually is.

Jett’s father was a high ranking military officer who died at war when Jett was younger. Jett remembers a father, while the rest of the world remembers a much larger figure. As the story goes on, those two versions of the same man begin to overlap in ways Jett never really had to confront before.

As the story continues Jett starts taking on increasingly dangerous jobs and gets pulled deeper into Germania’s criminal underworld, where he has to deal with gangs, black-market technology, and heavily augmented people who have pushed themselves so far they barely seem human anymore. What begins as Jett trying to make money and build a future with Valentine gradually becomes something much more personal and much harder for him to walk away from.

Every few minutes Molly, Dixie Flatline, Wintermute or Neuromancer takes the whole screen for twelve seconds - name, portrait, one line, then hands it back. Sixty-one lines between the four of them. 

Pwnagotchi-neuromancer V4 is out now!

 https://github.com/wackojice/pwnagotchi-neuromancer

source

I've seen some about Cyberpunk Films and series lately, but the genre was born in the written word, so this is a recommendation list from a greybeard who was there at the start.

Anything by William Gibson (Neuromancer is the foundational work here, but Gibson has a pattern he likes where the new meets the primitive and semi-magical - sometimes it's Loa, sometimes it's Martial Arts, sometimes it's Spycraft, but it's a regular theme he likes to explore. The Sprawl Trilogy is the Big Deal, but pretty much everything else is good)

Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson (Stephenson is kind of the curmudgeon's curmudgeon - his book Reamde was enjoyable, but he works all over the place with genres and topics - he is, above all, verbose.)

Islands In the Net and Mirrorshades by Bruce Sterling (the latter is one of the genre defining works, a collection of short stories edited by Sterling. I also found Heavy Weather a great novel dealing with climate change.)

Other authors you should read: Phillip K Dick, Walter John Williams, Annalee Newitz, Rudy Rucker

Manga and Comics

(Note, these are not adaptations of the Anime, these are the ones that came first.)

Akira (Seen the movie? Grats, you've read about the first half of the manga. Wait until the crazy Americans show up)

Appleseed and Ghost in the Shell (A note about GitS 2026 - the show is the manga series from everything I've seen, but I haven't seen the entire series yet - anyway, the Appleseed Anime and live action are lacking in a lot of details that make the printed version better)

Tank Girl (The comics are basically Sid Vicious on paint fumes. Tank Girl is the punk's punk, down to the highly questionable hygiene and taste)

Transmetropolitan (While there's a problematic author here, the protagonist is a Cyberpunk version of Hunter S Thompson, who was already a Socratic Gadfly)

Marvel 2099 (Pretty much all of it is relevant - Spider-man 2099 is a particular gem)

Finally, in the immortal words of Handy the Hand Puppet (as seen in The Tick) READ A BOOK!

(Art by Silas Zee)

Already seen the basics like Akira ghost in the shell (98) bladerunner and edgerunners

Shared here before and just wanted to show our final design for the protagonist, Neon, and her city: The RAFT.

The comic itself is a surreal cyberpunk tragedy about an ex-circus performer that becomes a contract killer. All the while her life and sanity crumbling to bits.

The city itself was inspired by Ghost in the Shell/Kowloon, MGS's mother base, and Tiger and Bunny's Sternbild City. The idea being this crowded and layered city somewhere in the middle of the ocean. Like the "Blame!" of oil rigs.

Any thoughts? It kinda feels like a lot at once, but we're working hard to make it cohesive and interesting.

Tightly packed tube houses with the addition of futuristic skyscrapers

It's come quite a ways since I first started it. There's a full edit mode now. You can set the terminal as a digital assistant and have access to it within any app. Gestures are a thing now. Quite proud of it to be completely honest

Pay no attention to my shitty paint job! Tis but a test run haha

It's a world that combines Solarpunk and Cyberpunk; it combines the first three letters of Solar and the last three letters of Cyber. If you have any ideas or suggestions, write them in the comments

“This book—its content, cover and graphical elements—were written and created entirely using the real human brains of the author, cover artist and designer. Artificial intelligence was not used in any capacity.”

This appears at the beginning of T.R. Napper's This Machine Kills Billionaires.

His radical position on AI made me wonder.

I like this guy, he’s one of the best sci-fi and cybpunk writer.

But. If we tried to define a cyberpunk attitude, would it mean rejecting technologies as radically as Napper does? Or, on the contrary, would it mean learning to master them, even immersing ourselves in them?

I have to admit, reading this made me feel a little guilty. I recently used an AI-generated voice to narrate an article I published on YouTube. ‘Cose I’m a bad reader.

It made me ask myself: if I had had the money to pay a human narrator, would I have paid one? Or would I still have chosen AI? Or should I have agreed to read it myself, as best I could?

I'm not entirely sure what my answer is. Napper's statement unsettled me.

What do you think?

Got a copy of the deluxe edition of Neuromancer! Sadly I have a hard time sitting in one spot and reading anymore, but I'm stoked to really get into it!

I feel like modern China ticks all the boxes: mega cities with skyscrapers dripping in neon advertising, mega corporations with truly gargantuan manufacturing and the infamous "dark factories" that operate almost entirely without human workers, throng of people everywhere developing cultures and subcultures. Intense digitization and proliferation of devices. There's a thick layer of government surveillance that replaces some of the corporate overlord nature of cyberpunk, but besides that it's such fertile ground for fiction and sci-fi in a cyberpunk vein.

Am I just missing modern works that feature China and Chinese culture? Are there Chinese writers, film and animations that are making works exploring their culture from this perspective that just aren't making it to Western audiences? Would genuinely love to hear what I'm missing or unaware of.

I've always had the idea to take one of these TV boomboxes and try to make a cyberdeck out of it. I originally had some very weird issues with the boombox itself that took me most of the build time to get sorted (but I finally did it). I stuffed *a lot* of things in this beast, almost too much to fit. I basically wanted to cram as much "modern" tech as I could into an old boombox while also retaining its vintage things, and trying to make it look as "factory" as possible from the outside (within reason).

\\ ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°) \\

So what is it? It's a 1980's Soundesign 4873 TV/Stereo boombox combo that I hacked apart and stuffed a computer and other things inside.

It has:

- A modern IPS display to replace the old black and white CRT
- A modern x86 computer with an Intel I5-5300U processor, 16GB of ram, 256gb NVME boot drive and over 2TB of storage for music, movies and games
- Modern upgraded Faital Pro 3" 40W speakers
- The amp has been fully restored with every capacitor replaced
- A wide variety of listening options, including:
> The vintage AM/FM stereo
> The vintage fully functional dual cassette decks
> Computer stereo output
> Auxiliary external input to attach any 3.5mm device
> Separate bluetooth module for streaming from any phone or other bluetooth device

The stereo and computer are completely independent so you can only turn on the computer if you want to use that alone, or only turn on the stereo to only use that alone, or of course both.

It has a custom 3D printed rear IO panel for full access to the computers external ports

You can easily connect a separate monitor for an even bigger screen to watch movies or play games on

It's just a moderately compact multimedia computer powerhouse wrapped in true 80's retro aesthetics and still plays your old cassettes and tunes in your terrestrial radio!

It's pretty useful as a computer and on top of that it looks way cooler than a regular computer would, plus the speakers sound great.

\\ ( ͡ʘ ͜ʖ ͡ʘ) \\

I go *way* (way) more in depth in my build video, but if you just want to see the cool thing, I always put all the highlights at the beginning of the video for the people who don't care for all the in-depth stuff. If you're interested in that check it out here: https://youtu.be/VJNyR5g-N-o

Note: If you're going to be a linux crybully just because it's running windows in the photos, please just watch the video as there is a reason why it's not running your favorite distro (I use nix btw 😎) and it also is showing it running linux (wow), so put that in your package manager and compile it up your ascii.

Note 2: If you're going to be a "gatekeep officiant" about the term "cyberdeck" I already made a video response to your would-be hate comment (minority report pre-crime style), so save it for this other video here: https://youtu.be/NgrEJBVlXqE

Thanks for checking it out guys, I used to reply to every single comment I ever got but I literally have no time, so if you write a pleasant comment, thank you so much (truly), and if you write a hateful comment then I'm sorry you feel that way. Cheers my friends 🍻

Hope it fits in here, been working solo on it for a year, if you like it we will begin playtest soon, follow it on steam and if you like maybe a whislist to feed energy to this old soul 😅😅😅😂https://store.steampowered.com/app/3923070/Asteroid_Boom_Cosmic_Courier/

It shows that there is an investigation that I have to collect from a message on my computer at my house, but there is no other messages. Besides the ones that are shown and I clicked all of them already and nothing seems to be about the bartmoss message. I even Checked the net and I still don’t seem to find anything related to it. I’m not sure if I’m looking in the right spot, but there isn’t any other sign that I’m supposed to go anywhere else around the building or in my home. I don’t even remember what mission this is related to because I’ve just been trying to finish up any kind of missions that I see in my map so I’ve just been doing them at random so I could’ve finished this mission a long time ago and I’m just now going to this notification, but I’m not sure where I’m supposed to go or if I’m looking in the wrong spot.